Gallows in My Garden

by Deming, Richard

  “The bath is over there,” she said, pointing across the room. “If you want anything, pull the cord over the bed.”

  “What time’s dinner?” I asked.

  “Seven-thirty, but they’re all having cocktails in the drawing-room now, so you can go down whenever you want.”

  There was an elusive air of resentment in her tone, and a deliberate absence of “sirs.” Not that I care even if housemaids call me “Bub,” but it struck a peculiar note in a household seemingly run like a hotel. Apparently she had a grudge, but it could hardly be a personal one against me, for I had never seen her before.

  I let it go by thanking her for her trouble, unpacked my small grip, and descended to the drawing-room.

  Grace and Arnold had not yet come down, but five other people were in the room. The first things to register on me were an evening gown and a white mess jacket, and momentarily I thought, without much concern, that my light-tan gabardine suit was going to be distinctly out of place. Then I realized only two of the group were dressed, which put me with the majority.

  A woman about thirty or a little over, whom I judged to be the stepmother, Ann, commanded all my immediate attention. She was as breath-takingly beautiful as Grace, but in an entirely different way. She was tall and raven-haired, with a milk-white complexion and calm, luminous eyes a man could have drowned in. She wore a dinner gown cut to look as if it were going to slip loose and slither down around her ankles at any minute, but instead of thinking it daring, you immediately accepted the fact that unnecessary concealment of such an obviously fine form would have been censorship of art. As with Grace, your first impulse when she looked at you was a desire to pat her, but in this case not on the head.

  The only other woman was a gaunt, middle-aged spinster whose uncurled gray hair was worn in a boyish bob. She had on a severely tailored gray suit and an expression like a ferret’s.

  Two men stood before the small bar with the ladies, one about sixty years old and the other about forty. The older man was constructed like a slab of granite, huge and solid and ponderous of movement. His face was firm and unwrinkled, except for two deep creases between his eyes, and its sculpturing was along the line of Benito Mussolini’s. He wore a light-blue business suit.

  The other man was slight and quick-moving, a debonair man-about-town in white mess jacket and patent leather pumps. He had the sharp, amusing face of a master of ceremonies in a burlesque house.

  The fifth person was a Negro houseboy behind the bar.

  Ann Lawson glanced over at me without surprise, set down her glass, and approached with a warm smile.

  “I’m Mrs. Lawson,” she said, offering me a remarkably strong hand.

  I told her my name and that I had come out at the invitation of her stepdaughter and Arnold Tate. She introduced the other woman as her aunt, Abigail Stoltz, adding the identification, “The painter, you know,” at which I nodded agreeably, though the name meant nothing to me. The older man turned out to be Jonathan Mannering, the family lawyer, and the other Dr. Douglas Lawson, Mrs. Lawson’s brother-in-law and Grace’s Uncle Doug.

  When introductions were completed, Ann asked, “Are you connected with the university, Mr. Moon?”

  I said no and was saved from elaboration by the entrance of Grace and Arnold. Apparently everyone suited individual taste in dinner dress here, for Grace wore a frilly, informal party dress and Arnold the same sport coat and slacks he arrived in.

  “You’ve met everyone, have you, Mr. Moon?” Grace inquired. “Hello, everybody. Hi, Unc!” The last greeting she emphasized by standing on tiptoes and planting a kiss on the debonair doctor’s cheek.

  He grinned at his niece fondly and winked at Arnold. Mrs. Lawson gave Arnold as warm a welcome as she had me, but Mannering and Abigail Stoltz greeted him with tepid politeness.

  “What will you have to drink, Mr. Moon?” Ann Lawson inquired. “And you, Arnold?”

  I said I would have rye and water, and Arnold chose a Martini. Grace settled for a nonalcoholic Coke.

  Conversation stayed on a small-talk level while we worked toward the bottoms of our glasses. Amid dead silence on the parts of Arnold and myself, Grace built me an elaborate academic background, sketching in a mythical past career as a high-school teacher, presumably to account for the nearly ten years I had on her fiancé, explaining that I taught in the wintertime and attended the university each summer, placing me in the same thesis seminar as Arnold, and even giving a title for my supposed thesis: The Use of the Comma in Shakespeare. Later I learned she had rummaged through the stacks of the university library and obtained the title from an actual master’s thesis submitted ten years before.

  “How’d Shakespeare use the comma?” Uncle Doug asked.

  “As punctuation,” I said shortly, wishing Grace would shut her beautiful little trap.

  Maggie, the housekeeper, appeared in the arch from the dining-room and announced dinner was ready. During dinner I took the opportunity of studying the group more closely, adding little to my knowledge except that Abigail Stoltz rarely opened her mouth; Jonathan Mannering had an old-world manner and a stock of complimentary clichés which he ponderously showered on his hostess, and that Dr. Douglas Lawson had a delightful sense of humor.

  Ann seemed to be as fond of Douglas as her niece was, and once or twice I seemed to detect more than a sister-in-law’s indulgence in her laughter at his dry wit.

  We were served by Kate and the Negro houseboy who had been tending bar.

  Throughout the meal I had been wondering where the fifth habitual week-end guest was, the man Grace had mentioned as general manager of the Lawson Drug chain. As. we returned to the drawing-room for coffee, Ann cleared up the mystery.

  “Gerald Cushing will be out later this evening,” she told Jonathan Mannering. “He wants to see you about a corporate surplus, or something important-sounding like that.”

  “Indeed?” the big man intoned. “Are you sure that isn’t an excuse to visit a beautiful woman? I use business as an excuse all the time, myself.”

  Which gives an idea of what the lawyer considered delightful compliment, and is the reason I have not reported his previous conversation in detail.

  I wondered if Gerald Cushing were a bachelor, too, and if he, Douglas Lawson, and Jonathan Mannering were all politely suiting for the widowed Ann’s hand. My wondering was cut short by an overalled youngster about seventeen years of age, who burst in suddenly from the front porch.

  “Ma’am!” he blurted out at Ann. “There’s a dead man caught on a snag halfway down the bluff!”

  IV

  THE INITIAL REACTION of everyone was speechless surprise. Mine was greater than that of anyone else, for in addition to the shock of the announcement, the incongruity of a boy in overalls suddenly appearing in these sleek surroundings was startling in itself. Apparently everyone else knew who the boy was.

  Ann Lawson was the first to recover.

  “Where, Karl? On our property?”

  He advanced farther into the room, a large, gangling lad with coarse yellow hair, a big nose, and protruding ears.

  “Right behind the house, ma’am. Not twenty feet from the beach stairway. You can’t see him from above or below, or from the stairs, but I was out in the skiff fishin', and I seen him from the river.”

  Douglas Lawson rose to his feet. “Show us the place, Karl. How do you know he’s dead?”

  “He’s hanging sort of head down, and he didn’t move. I watched near five minutes.”

  We all trooped out behind Karl and circled the house to the bluff at the rear. Though it was eight-thirty, the combination of long summer days and daylight-saving time had pushed dusk to nine o’clock. On top of the bluff it was still quite bright, but since the steep bank faced east, the iron stairway was already in deep shadow.

  We followed Karl down in single file, Dr. Lawson immediately behind the boy, then Ann, Abigail, Grace, Arnold, and Mannering, with me bringing up the rear. About fifty feet down we reached a le
dge approximately six feet wide, and here a roofed and railed platform containing three wicker lawn chairs stretched a dozen feet both ways along the ledge. Beyond the platform the stairway again began its steep descent.

  Karl went to the north railing and pointed to where the ledge petered out to a mere six inches when it reached a bulge in the side of the bluff. A light puff of wind brought a faint but unmistakable odor to us.

  “He’s just the other side of that,” the boy said. “Want I should go over there and see who it is?”

  “You might fall,” Ann said.

  Arnold put in slowly, “Perhaps the proper person to investigate is Mr. Moon, since he has a semiofficial connection with the police.”

  Everyone but Grace glanced at me with varying degrees of surprise. She continued to stare at the narrow path, her face pinched and empty. I looked over the narrow railing at the fifty-foot drop, examined the slender foothold again, and shook my head.

  “I couldn’t make it,” I said.

  “I been over there before,” Karl said. “It’s easy if you lean inward and feel your way.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy for me,” I said.

  “It doesn’t look dangerous,” Arnold insisted. “I’ll follow, if you want.”

  “Sorry. I said I couldn’t do it.”

  He looked at me first with surprise, then his lips curled slightly. “Acrophobia?”

  “If it’s any of your business,” I said, suddenly irritated, “I have a false leg. I have to be able to see where I put my foot.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Sorry. I’ll go.”

  Without further ado he swung over the railing, walked along the ledge until it began to narrow, then faced the wall and edged around the bulge sidewise.

  “Just look and come back,” I called after him. “Don’t disturb anything.” In view of the odor there was no point in issuing first-aid instructions.

  A long time seemed to drag by after he disappeared from sight, but actually it was only two or three minutes before he edged his way back again. He climbed over the rail without saying anything, his eyes averted from those of Grace.

  “It’s Don, isn’t it?” she asked in a flat voice.

  He nodded, still not looking at her. His eyes touched Ann briefly, then swung to me. “He must have been there all along. Shouldn’t we call the police?”

  “I’ll call them,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do here. Suppose we return to the house.”

  The spirit of quiet festivity had been replaced by one of funereal silence when we again gathered in the drawing-room. Ann conducted me to a phone in what had apparently been her husband’s study and left me alone.

  The number I called was not police headquarters, but the bachelor apartment of Inspector Warren Day, chief of Homicide. My long relationship with Day was a peculiar half-friendly, half-enemy one, but in spite of the fact that neither of us hardly ever spoke a courteous word to the other, we managed to maintain fairly effective mutual co-operation.

  “Manny Moon,” I said when he came to the phone. “Nobody answers at police headquarters, so I called you. They must have forgotten to pay the phone bill.”

  “What bar you in?” he inquired.

  “I’m out at the Lawson home in Willow Dale. Remember the Lawson kid who supposedly ran away last Sunday?”

  “Vaguely. What about him?”

  “We just found his body. He fell off the bluff and has been lying halfway down all along.”

  “Well?” he said. “There’s cops on duty. Why bother me with a routine accident?”

  “Because it may be murder, and if it is, it’s going to require kid-glove handling. Some of the most important people in town are going to be suspects. I think it merits the personal attention of the chief of Homicide.”

  “Blast you, Moon,” he growled. “Why can‘t you find bodies in the daytime? You only work about a third of the time yourself, but you expect me to work night and day.”

  “I don’t care what you do,” I said. “Send out a rookie if you want. He’ll probably report it as an accident and let it go at that. But whoever comes better bring a fifty-foot rope to salvage the body.”

  I hung up without waiting for his reply.

  When I returned to the drawing-room, a short, stocky man wearing horn-rimmed glasses had been added to the group. He had a brisk, businesslike appearance, a cherubic face, and sparse blond hair parted in the middle.

  “This is Mr. Cushing, Mr. Moon,” Ann introduced him. “He arrived while you were phoning.”

  He pumped my hand as though he were really glad to meet me, then immediately turned his attention back to Ann.

  “Of course, I won’t stay under the circumstances,” he said. “Is there anything I can do for you? Make funeral arrangements, for example?”

  Before Ann could reply, I said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to stay until the police arrive, Mr. Cushing.”

  The drug chain manager looked at me sharply. “Why? What could they possibly want with me?”

  “They’ll want to see everyone who was here when Don disappeared.”

  He looked surprised. “How do you know that includes me?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan Mannering put in somberly. “Perhaps Gerald should stay, but it seems to me you’re assuming a lot of authority for a guest.”

  “Mr. Moon isn’t exactly a guest,” Arnold announced. “He’s Grace’s hired bodyguard. There’s no point in keeping it a secret any longer. Someone has been trying to kill Grace, and apparently they succeeded with Don.”

  In the shocked silence which followed, Grace, who sat on the sofa next to Arnold, slipped her hand into his and regarded Ann and Douglas miserably.

  “Preposterous!” rumbled Mannering.

  “No,” Dr. Lawson said. “Mr. Moon’s profession is a surprise to me, but it’s quite true someone has been trying to kill Grace. I’ve been doing a little quiet investigating myself, without any success.”

  Ann said, “Grace! Why didn’t you say something, child?”

  “Because—because—” she said incoherently, then lapsed into silence.

  “Because apparently the would-be killer is someone in the house,” I explained helpfully. “Either one of you in this room or one of the servants.”

  “Preposterous!” Mannering contributed.

  I shrugged, fished a cigar from my pocket, and relaxed in an easy chair to await the arrival of the police.

  They came without the usual announcement of sirens. I am not a cynic, but I could not help wondering if the Lawson eight or eighteen million dollars, whichever it was, had anything to do with their quiet arrival. I am morally certain if they came to investigate a body at my flat, you could hear the sirens all over town.

  Warren Day had with him his usual shadow, Lieutenant Hannegan, who was attired in the inevitable blue serge suit that looked like a police uniform without brass buttons. After he entered, the inspector stood in the doorway scrutinizing the assembly for a moment, his hands thrust into his suit pockets and his thin figure arched forward to allow his eyes to peer over thick-lensed glasses. His pointed, white-tipped nose aimed deliberately at one person after another, his belligerent expression almost dissolving into a popeyed gawk as his gaze touched Ann and Grace, but hardening to normal when it passed from them to Abigail Stoltz.

  Then he suddenly swept his hat from his skinny bald head and barked, “I’m Inspector Warren Day of Homicide!”

  I brought my palms together silently in pantomime applause, and got a deep scowl for my effort.

  “All right, Moon! What’s going on here?”

  “I’ll show you the body,” I said. “Bring lights and a rope?”

  “We brought everything but the jail. Let’s go.” Leaving Hannegan in charge of the people in the drawing-room, Day followed me around back of the house. In the parking-court was the laboratory truck, the morgue wagon, a pickup with a winch, and a squad car. Enough cops to spread a city-wide dragnet had come with the vehicles.

  It had g
rown dark, so I borrowed a hand flash from one of the cops and led the inspector down to the midway platform. A uniformed policeman, a photographer carrying a flash camera, and a medical examiner followed us down.

  “He’s around the other side of that bulge,” I said, flashing my light on the six-inch foothold.

  “I’ll examine him when you get him up,” the medic announced, and started climbing the stairs again.

  “Get out there and take some pictures,” Day told the police photographer.

  “Who, me?” the man asked.

  “Yes, you!”

  “That ledge is pretty narrow,” the man said doubtfully.

  “Get going!” the inspector bawled. “You’re insured, aren’t you?”

  The photographer looked at him dumbly, then slowly climbed the rail and approached the point it began to narrow. I could sympathize with his reluctance, for by flashlight the path seemed almost impassable. Holding the camera aloft in his right hand, he cautiously began to sidestep around the bulge.

  “If you start to slip, set the camera down,” Inspector Day called.

  The photographer did not deign to reply.

  Day turned to the cop who had accompanied us. “Go up and start letting that rope down. He might as well attach the body while he’s out there.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said gratefully, and started to run up the steps before the inspector could change his mind.

  Twenty minutes later the body was on its way to the morgue, all the vehicles except the squad car had departed, and the inspector and I stood alone at the top of the bluff.

  “Now let’s have the dope,” he said. “What makes you think it’s murder?”

  “I didn’t say I thought it was murder. I said it might be. It might be suicide, too, or just an accident. But the dead kid and his sister were due to inherit half the mint if they reached twenty-one alive, and somebody’s been trying to kill the sister. Maybe the same someone pushed Don over the bluff.”

  “How do you mean, trying to kill the sister?”

  I said, “Things keep happening to her. Once the saddle girth on her riding-horse was cut so the saddle came off, once a flowerpot tried to brain her from an upper window, and once a glass of milk was poisoned.”